Harlem Schools: ‘Everything has to do with electronics’

ROCKFORD — Eighth-graders Adam Diav and Chris Anthony removed screws, snapped off pieces and shifted parts in all sorts of directions to get to the heart of a printer.

“Can we take this rod out?” Diav asked.

“It’s, like, glued,” Anthony responded.

“Well, go for that screw first,” Diav suggested.

It’s just a typical conversation overheard during Electronics Club at Harlem Middle School. A dozen seventh- and eighth-grade students spend every Wednesday afternoon taking apart machines, like printers, computers and even Tonka trucks, to learn how they work.

The materials are donated from community members who would like to see the students either fix the machines or scrap parts to build a different contraption. The students also use engineer kits with items like resistors, capacitated alarms and music components to learn how appliances work.

“I want to get them interested in something that has to do with electronics. Everything has to do with electronics (in the world),” club organizer Chris Noble said.

Machine components sometimes break during the dissection and others never find their original home, but he said that the exercise of taking things apart exposes kids to different forms of technology.

‘(I tell them) as you take it apart, you are going to be learning things, because if we want to build something, we are going to have to harvest pieces,” Noble said.

For many, like Diav and Anthony, the club is one of the few times they are encouraged to tinker with machines. They view it more like a challenging puzzle, though, rather than the first steps to learning a life skill or an introduction to technology.

“I can learn how things work and how I can fix it,” Diav said.

Jennifer Wheeler: 815-987-1354; jwheeler@rrstar.com; @jenmwheeler

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